Be it from selling scuba diving on a beach in the Philippines as a 22-year-old-baby-face to pitching ideas at an entrepreneurship community, relating past experiences, be it mine or someone else’s, to my current context has helped me to see other perspectives.This has helped me to understand more and see a bigger picture. And ultimately, I’ve been able to make better decisions.

But, how do you, in practice, connect these experiences to your current context? Do you just have that apple drop on your head and puff you’ve had the insight?

You are right. There’s better ways. For one, mentoring, for another, serious games. There’s a reason for this. Mentoring and serious games allow us to connect the dots because they are both mindfully engaging.

This means that we embrace a learning mindset where mistakes and successes are opportunities – experiences – to learn from. Being mindfully engaged means to be pondering ifs and whys; about if this would have been the case, then what would have happened, and why it happened. As an example, a mentor presents tough questions that allow reflection. Mentors also share their point of view and insights from their experience. This allows the mentee to reflect on his context from a different perspective, which then improves the mentee’s ability to connect the dots, the experiences together. Similarly, our serious games bring forth dozens of difficult questions and reflection and insights from all the experiences of the players. This discussion and collaboration allows the players to connect those dots and makes reflection exponential.

Life teaches, goes an old proverb, however what life really does is give us something to learn from: experience. And, when you share an experience, the listeners gain new perspectives. By reason, sharing and gaining perspectives allows us to reflect on how other people see the world. Just like I’ve reflected on my experiences and gained new insights, when a question is presented during a serious game the players share their experiences and elaborate how they perceive the matter and build on top of each other. This way, the players create an exponential amount of new perspectives. And this is where the value lies. During a serious game, you create new knowledge by sharing perspectives. For this reason, serious games bring acquiring new perspectives and reflection to a new level. And ultimately, improves the player’s decision making.

During interviews, or even during regular chats with friends, I’ve noticed when I say something in a jocular way – to me that is – and the recipient eye rolls or doesn’t even flinch, I tend to think, “OK, perhaps he’s/she’s not in the mood, or didn’t sleep well”, and by so, I change the way I speak. In its simplest format, this is doing and reflecting, or to rephrase it, learning by doing. This kind of learning is infinite, meaning it is constant and it continues our whole lifetime. We do things, we reflect on what we have done well and what went wrong and, normally, the older we become the wiser we become.

Some of this action and reflection happens in the moment, however, we don’t always stop to ask ourselves the questions that take time and effort. I don’t mean to say that people are lazy, but the brain is simply built to save energy, and therefore it tries to make quick interpretations. For more on how our mind works, we recommend reading “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

In some cases, the action-reflection loop requires deeper thinking and feedback.

One way to improve the quality of reflection is to use dialogue and co-creation. This leads to more impactful insights and actions. And, as all the people who have played our games bring so much professional expertise and life experience to the table, it’s fascinating to see how they reach better and different insights together rather than reflecting alone.

To sum it up, the idea of our games is to improve the quality of the players actions by improving the quality of reflection and insights. We do this by serious dialogue, co-creation and teaching people to ask powerful questions. And, to ensure that reflection goes to action we provide players a tool called Insights Recording Sheet*.